Breach at Sabre Corp.’s Hospitality Unit

May 2, 2017
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Breaches involving major players in the hospitality industry continue to pile up. Today, travel industry giant Sabre Corp. disclosed what could be a significant breach of payment and customer data tied to bookings processed through a reservations system that serves more than 32,000 hotels and other lodging establishments.

sabreIn a quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today, Southlake, Texas-based Sabre said it was “investigating an incident of unauthorized access to payment information contained in a subset of hotel reservations processed through our Hospitality Solutions SynXis Central Reservations system.”

According to Sabre’s marketing literature, more than 32,000 properties use Sabre’s SynXis reservations system, described as an inventory management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that “enables hoteliers to support a multitude of rate, inventory and distribution strategies to achieve their business goals.”

Sabre said it has engaged security forensics firm Mandiant to support its investigation, and that it has notified law enforcement.

“The unauthorized access has been shut off and there is no evidence of continued unauthorized activity,” reads a brief statement that Sabre sent to affected properties today. “There is no reason to believe that any other Sabre systems beyond SynXis Central Reservations have been affected.”

Sabre’s software, data, mobile and distribution solutions are used by hundreds of airlines and thousands of hotel properties to manage critical operations, including passenger and guest reservations, revenue management, flight, network and crew management. Sabre also operates a leading global travel marketplace, which processes more than $110 billion of estimated travel spend annually by connecting travel buyers and suppliers.

Sabre told customers that it didn’t have any additional details about the breach to share at this time, so it remains unclear what the exact cause of the breach may be or for how long it may have persisted.

A card involving traveler transactions for even a small percentage of the 32,000 properties that are using Sabre’s impacted technology could jeopardize a significant number of customer credit cards in a short amount of time.

The news comes amid revelations about a blossoming breach at Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG), the parent company that manages some 5,000 hotels worldwide, including Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express. Continue reading →

Blind Trust in Email Could Cost You Your Home

April 27, 2017
94 Comments

The process of buying or selling a home can be extremely stressful and complex, but imagine the stress that would boil up if — at settlement — your money was wired to scammers in another country instead of to the settlement firm or escrow company. Here’s the story about a phishing email that cost a couple their home and left them scrambling for months to recover hundreds of thousands in cash that went missing.

It was late November 2016, and Jon and Dorothy Little were all set to close on a $200,000 home in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Just prior to the closing date on Dec. 2 their realtor sent an email to the Little’s and to the law firm handling the closing, asking the settlement firm for instructions on wiring the money to an escrow account.

The fraudulent wire instructions apparently sent by the hackers via the settlement law firm.

The fraudulent wire instructions apparently sent by the hackers via the settlement law firm.

An attorney with the closing firm responded with wiring instructions as requested, attaching a document that had the law firm’s logo and some bank account information that was represented as the seller’s account number. The Little’s realtor sent the wire on Thursday morning, the day before settlement.

“We went to closing at 1 p.m. on Friday, and after we signed all the papers, we asked the lawyers if we were going to get back the extra money we had sent them, because they hadn’t be able to give us an exact amount in the wiring instructions. At that point they told us they had never gotten the money.”

After some disagreement, both legitimate parties to the transaction agreed that someone’s email had been hacked by the fraudsters, and was used to divert the wired funds to an account the criminals controlled. The hackers had forged a copy of the law firm’s letterhead, and beneath it placed their own Bank of America account information (see screen shot above).

The owner of the Bank of America account appears to have been a willing or unwitting accomplice — also know as a “money mule” — recruited through work-at-home job schemes to receive and forward funds stolen from hacked business accounts. In this case, the money mule wired all but 10 percent of the money (a typical money mule commission) to an account at TD Bank.

Fortunately for the Littles, the FBI succeeded in having the resulting $180,000 wire transfer frozen once it hit the TD Bank account. However, efforts to recover the stolen funds were stymied immediately when the Littles’ credit union refused to give Bank of America a so-called “hold harmless” agreement that the bigger bank wanted as a legal guarantee before agreeing to help.

Charisse Castagnoli, an adjunct professor of law at the John Marshall Law School, said banks have a fiduciary duty to their customers to honor their requests in good faith, and as such they tend to be very nervous legally about colluding with another bank to reverse payment instructions by one of their own customers. The “hold harmless” agreement is usually sought by the bank which received a fraudulent wire transfer, Castagnoli said, and it requires the responding bank to assume any and all liability for costs that the requesting bank may later incur should the owner of account which received the fraudulent wire decide to dispute the payment reversal.

“When it comes to wire fraud cases the banks have to move very quickly because once the wires make it outside the U.S. to foreign banks, the money is usually as good as gone,” Castagnoli said. “The receiver or transferee usually insists on a hold harmless agreement because they’re moving the money on behalf of their own account holder, kind of going against their own client which is a big ‘no-no’ when you’re a fiduciary.”

But in this case, the credit union in which the Littles had invested virtually all of their money for more than 40 years decided it could not in good faith provide that hold harmless agreement, because doing so would stipulate that the credit union affirms the victim (the Littles) hadn’t willingly and knowing initiated the wire, when in fact they had.

“I talked to the wire dept multiple times,” Mr. Little said of the folks at his financial institution, Atlanta, Ga.-based Delta Community Credit Union (DCCU). “They finally put me through to the vice president of loss prevention at the credit union. I’m not sure they even believed all that was going on. They finally came back and told me they couldn’t do it. Their rules would not allow them to send a hold harmless letter because I had asked them to do something and they had done it. They had a big meeting last week with apparently the CEO of the credit union and several other people. Then they called me on Monday again and told me they would not could not do it.” Continue reading →

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UK Man Gets Two Years in Jail for Running ‘Titanium Stresser’ Attack-for-Hire Service

April 25, 2017
51 Comments

A 20-year-old man from the United Kingdom was sentenced to two years in prison today after admitting to operating and selling access to “Titanium Stresser,” a simple-to-use service that let paying customers launch crippling online attacks against Web sites and individual Internet users.

Adam Mudd of Hertfordshire, U.K. admitted to three counts of computer misuse connected with his creating and operating the attack service, also known as a “stresser” or “booter” tool. Services like Titanium Stresser coordinate so-called “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attacks that hurl huge barrages of junk data at a site in a bid to make it crash or become otherwise unreachable to legitimate visitors.

Mudd's TitaniumStresser service.

Mudd’s TitaniumStresser service.

According to U.K. prosecutors, Mudd’s Titanium Stresser service was used by others in more than 1.7 million denial-of-service attacks against victims worldwide, with most countries in the world affected at some point. He originally built the booter service at the age of 15, earning more than $300,000 in ill-gotten gains from it. Also during his interviews, he admitted security breaches against his own college while he was there studying computer science.

Mudd pleaded guilty to three offences under the U.K. Computer Misuse Act and a further offense of money laundering under the Proceeds of Crime Act in October 2016.

“Today, he was sentenced to 24 months imprisonment for his own DDoS attacks, nine months for running a titanium stressor service and 24 months for money laundering the proceeds made from the stressor service, all to run concurrently,” reads a press release issued by the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU), an anti-cybercrime unit that worked with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency to investigate Mudd.

Detective Chief Inspector Martin Peters of the ERSOU’s Regional Crime Unit recalled that at sentencing the judge said the defendant likely would have received six years if he’d been tried as an adult and if he had no medical issues. Mudd had been slated to be sentenced last week, but that hearing was delayed until today after the court heard medical testimony on Mudd’s apparent struggles with autism.

The Mudd case is the latest in a string of law enforcement actions in the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere targeting booter service operators and their customers. In December 2016, federal investigators in the United States and Europe arrested nearly three-dozen people suspected of patronizing booter services. That crackdown was part of an effort by authorities to weaken demand for booter and stresser services and to impress upon customers that hiring someone to launch cyberattacks on your behalf can land you in jail.

In October 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged two 19-year-old men alleged to have run booter services tied to the “Lizard Squad” hacking group. That same month the sprawling discussion forum Hackforums — once the most bustling marketplace on the Internet where people could compare and purchase booter and stresser service subscriptions — announced that it was permanently banning the sale and advertising of booters.  Continue reading →

The Backstory Behind Carder Kingpin Roman Seleznev’s Record 27 Year Prison Sentence

April 24, 2017
65 Comments

Roman Seleznev, a 32-year-old Russian cybercriminal and prolific credit card thief, was sentenced Friday to 27 years in federal prison. That is a record punishment for hacking violations in the United States and by all accounts one designed to send a message to criminal hackers everywhere. But a close review of the case suggests that Seleznev’s record sentence was severe in large part because the evidence against him was substantial and yet he declined to cooperate with prosecutors prior to his trial.

Maldives_(orthographic_projection).svg

The Maldives is a South Asian island country, located in the Indian Ocean, situated in the Arabian Sea. Source: Wikipedia.

The son of an influential Russian politician, Seleznev made international headlines in 2014 after he was captured while vacationing in The Maldives, a popular vacation spot for Russians and one that many Russian cybercriminals previously considered to be out of reach for western law enforcement agencies.

However, U.S. authorities were able to negotiate a secret deal with the Maldivian government to apprehend Seleznev. Following his capture, Seleznev was whisked away to Guam for more than a month before being transported to Washington state to stand trial for computer hacking charges.

The U.S. Justice Department says the laptop found with him when he was arrested contained more than 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers, and that evidence presented at trial showed that Seleznev earned tens of millions of dollars defrauding more than 3,400 financial institutions.

Investigators also reportedly found a smoking gun: a password cheat sheet that linked Seleznev to a decade’s worth of criminal hacking.

Seleznev was initially identified as a major cybercriminal by U.S. government investigators in 2011, when prosecutors in Nevada named him as part of a conspiracy involving more than three dozen popular merchants on carder[dot]su, a bustling fraud forum where he and other members openly marketed various cybercrime-oriented services.

Known by the hacker handle “nCux,” Seleznev operated multiple online shops that sold stolen credit and debit card data. According to Seleznev’s indictment in the Nevada case, he was part of a group that hacked into restaurants between 2009 and 2011 and planted malicious software to steal card data from store point-of-sale devices.

In Seattle on Aug. 25, 2016, Seleznev was convicted of 10 counts of wire fraud, eight counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, nine counts of obtaining information from a protected computer, nine counts of possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices and two counts of aggravated identity theft.

“Simply put, Roman Seleznev has harmed more victims and caused more financial loss than perhaps any other defendant that has appeared before the court,” federal prosecutors charged in their sentencing memorandum. “This prosecution is unprecedented.”

Seleznev’s lawyer Igor Litvak called his client’s sentence “draconian,” saying that Seleznev was gravely injured in a 2011 terrorist attack in Morocco, has Hepatitis B and is not well physically.

Litvak noted that his client also faces two more prosecutions — in Georgia and Nevada, and that his client is likely to be shipped off to Nevada soon.

“It’s unprecedented, yes, but it’s also a draconian sentence for a person who is very gravely ill,” Litvak said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “He’s not going to live that long. He’s going to die in jail. I’m certain of that.”
Continue reading →

Tracing Spam: Diet Pills from Beltway Bandits

April 19, 2017
63 Comments

Reading junk spam messages isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but sometimes fun can be had when you take a moment to check who really sent the email. Here’s the simple story of how a recent spam email advertising celebrity “diet pills” was traced back to a Washington, D.C.-area defense contractor that builds tactical communications systems for the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

atballYour average spam email can contain a great deal of information about the systems used to blast junk email. If you’re lucky, it may even offer insight into the organization that owns the networked resources (computers, mobile devices) which have been hacked for use in sending or relaying junk messages.

Earlier this month, anti-spam activist and expert Ron Guilmette found himself poring over the “headers” for a spam message that set off a curious alert. “Headers” are the usually unseen addressing and routing details that accompany each message. They’re generally unseen because they’re hidden unless you know how and where to look for them.

Let’s take the headers from this particular email — from April 12, 2017 — as an example. To the uninitiated, email headers may seem like an overwhelming dump of information. But there really are only a few things we’re interested in here (Guilmette’s actual email address has been modified to “ronsdomain.example.com” in the otherwise unaltered spam message headers below): Continue reading →

InterContinental Hotel Chain Breach Expands

April 18, 2017
35 Comments

In December 2016, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that fraud experts at various banks were seeing a pattern suggesting a widespread credit card breach across some 5,000 hotels worldwide owned by InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). In February, IHG acknowledged a breach but said it appeared to involve only a dozen properties. Now, IHG has released data showing that cash registers at more than 1,000 of its properties were compromised with malicious software designed to siphon customer debit and credit card data.

An Intercontinental hotel in New York City.

An Intercontinental hotel in New York City.

Headquartered in Denham, U.K., IHG operates more than 5,000 hotels across nearly 100 countries. The company’s dozen brands include Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, InterContinental, Kimpton Hotels, and Crowne Plaza.

According to a statement released by IHG, the investigation “identified signs of the operation of malware designed to access payment card data from cards used onsite at front desks at certain IHG-branded franchise hotel locations between September 29, 2016 and December 29, 2016.”

IHG didn’t say how many properties total were affected, although it has published a state-by-state lookup tool available here. I counted 28 in my hometown state of Virginia alone, California more than double that; Alabama almost the same number as Virginia. So north of 1,000 locations nationwide seems very likely.

Update, April 19, 11:09 a.m. ET: Danish geek Christian Sonne writes that his research on the state lookup tool shows there are at least 1,175 properties on the list so far. The breakdown so far is: 1,175 properties across the USA and Puerto Rico in the following brands, Holiday Inn Express (781), Holiday Inn (176), Candlewood Suites (120), Staybridge Suites (54), Crowne Plaza (30), Hotel Indigo (11), Holiday Inn Resort (3).

Original story:

IHG has been offering its franchised properties a free examination by an outside computer forensic team hired to look for signs of the same malware infestation known to have hit front desk systems at other properties. But not all property owners have been anxious to take the company up on that offer. As a consequence, there may be more breached hotel locations yet to be added to the state lookup tool.

A letter from IHG to franchise customers, offering to pay for the cyber forensics examination.

A letter from IHG to franchise customers, offering to pay for the cyber forensics examination.

IHG franchises who accepted the security inspections were told they would receive a consolidated report sharing information specific to the property, and that “your acquiring bank and/or processor may contact you regarding this investigation.”

IHG also has been trying to steer franchised properties toward adopting its “secure payment solution” (SPS) that ensures cardholder data remains encrypted at all times and at every “hop” across the electronic transaction. According to IHG, properties that used its solution prior to the initial intrusion on Sept. 29, 2016 were not affected.

“Many more properties implemented SPS after September 29, 2016, and the implementation of SPS ended the ability of the malware to find payment card data,” IHG wrote. Continue reading →

Shoney’s Hit By Apparent Credit Card Breach

April 14, 2017
46 Comments

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another episode of “Which Restaurant Chain Got Hacked?” Multiple sources in the financial industry say they’ve traced a pattern of fraud on customer cards indicating that the latest victim may be Shoney’s, a 70-year-old restaurant chain that operates primarily in the southern United States.

Image: Thomas Hawk, Flickr.

Image: Thomas Hawk, Flickr.

Shoney’s did not respond to multiple requests for comment left with the company and its outside public relations firm over the past two weeks.

Based in Nashville, Tenn., the privately-held restaurant chain includes approximately 150 company-owned and franchised locations in 17 states from Maryland to Florida in the east, and from Missouri to Texas in the West — with the northernmost location being in Ohio, according to the company’s Wikipedia page.

Sources in the financial industry say they’ve received confidential alerts from the credit card associations about suspected breaches at dozens of those locations, although it remains unclear whether the problem is limited to those locations or if it extends company-wide. Those same sources say the affected locations were thought to have been breached between December 2016 and early March 2017.

It’s also unclear whether the apparent breach affects corporate-owned or franchised stores — or both. In last year’s card breach involving hundreds of Wendy’s restaurants, only franchised locations were thought to have been impacted. In the case of the intrusion at Arby’s, on the other hand, only corporate stores were affected. Continue reading →

Critical Security Updates from Adobe, Microsoft

April 12, 2017
47 Comments

Adobe and Microsoft separately issued updates on Tuesday to fix a slew of security flaws in their products. Adobe patched dozens of holes in its Flash Player, Acrobat and Reader products. Microsoft pushed fixes to address dozens of vulnerabilities in Windows and related software.

brokenwindowsThe biggest change this month for Windows users and specifically for people responsible for maintaining lots of Windows machines is that Microsoft has replaced individual security bulletins for patches with a single “Security Update Guide.”

This change follows closely on the heels of a move by Microsoft to bar home users from selectively downloading specific updates and instead issuing all monthly updates as one big patch blob.

Microsoft’s claims that customers have been clamoring for this consolidated guide notwithstanding, many users are likely to be put off by the new format, which seems to require a great deal more clicking and searching than under the previous rubric. In any case, Microsoft has released a FAQ explaining what’s changed and what folks can expect under the new arrangement.

By my count, Microsoft’s patches this week address some 46 security vulnerabilities, including flaws in Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Windows, Office, Visual Studio for Mac, .NET Framework, Silverlight and Adobe Flash Player.

At least two of the critical bugs fixed by Microsoft this month are already being exploited in active attacks, including a weakness in Microsoft Word that is showing up in attacks designed to spread the Dridex banking trojan.

Finally, a heads up for any Microsoft users still running Windows Vista: This month is slated to be the last that Vista will receive security updates. Vista was first released to consumers more than ten years ago — in January 2007 — so if you’re still using Vista it might be time to give a more modern OS a try (doesn’t have to be Windows…just saying). Continue reading →

Fake News at Work in Spam Kingpin’s Arrest?

April 11, 2017
95 Comments

Over the past several days, many Western news media outlets have predictably devoured thinly-sourced reporting from a Russian publication that the arrest last week of a Russian spam kingpin in Spain was related to hacking attacks linked to last year’s U.S. election. While there is scant evidence that the spammer’s arrest had anything to do with the election, the success of that narrative is a sterling example of how the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is adept at manufacturing fake news, undermining public trust in the media, and distracting attention away from the real story.

Russian President Vladimir Putin tours RT facilities. Image: DNI

Russian President Vladimir Putin tours RT facilities. Image: DNI

On Saturday, news broke from RT.com (formerly Russia Today) that authorities in Spain had arrested 36-year-old Peter “Severa” Levashov, one of the most-wanted spammers on the planet and the alleged creator of some of the nastiest cybercrime engines in history — including the Storm worm, and the Waledac and Kelihos spam botnets.

But the RT story didn’t lead with Levashov’s alleged misdeeds or his primacy among junk emailers and virus writers. Rather, the publication said it interviewed Levashov’s wife Maria, who claimed that Spanish authorities said her husband was detained because he was suspected of being involved in hacking attacks aimed at influencing the 2016 U.S. election.

The RT piece is fairly typical of one that covers the arrest of Russian hackers in that the story quickly becomes not about the criminal charges but about how the accused is being unfairly treated or maligned by overzealous or misguided Western law enforcement agencies.

The RT story about Levashov, for example, seems engineered to leave readers with the impression that some bumbling cops rudely disturbed the springtime vacation of a nice Russian family, stole their belongings, and left a dazed and confused young mother alone to fend for herself and her child.

This should not be shocking to any journalist or reader who has paid attention to U.S. intelligence agency reports on Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of last year’s election. A 25-page dossier released in January by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence describes RT as a U.S.-based but Kremlin-financed media outlet that is little more than an engine of anti-Western propaganda controlled by Russian intelligence agencies.

Somehow, this small detail was lost on countless Western media outlets, who seemed all too willing to parrot the narrative constructed by RT regarding Levashov’s arrest. With a brief nod to RT’s “scoop,” these publications back-benched the real story (the long-sought capture of one of the world’s most wanted spammers) and led with an angle supported by the flimsiest of sourcing. Continue reading →